Seventeen
At ticket booth number four, the cashier was a plump woman with long ringlets of auburn hair. The carnival had a jackpot drawing to entice people to stay later and spend more. When she took my money and gave me an admission ticket, she said, “Honey, be sure you stay for the big drawin’ at eleven-forty-five. Three nights, the winners didn’t hang around to collect, so now it’s up to twenty-two thousand dollars. Got to be here to win. Hang on to your ticket. You’re the one tonight, honey.” She had such a beatific smile that her sales pitch seemed like a sincere prediction.
My intuition—which is seldom wrong—insisted the carnival held secrets that, if revealed, would help me to discover the meaning of my nightmare and the nature of the threat hanging over Pico Mundo. Carnies are a tightly knit community and generally more law-abiding than the rest of us. But there was no reason to dismiss the notion that a few cultists might have made their home in the Sombra Brothers operation, perhaps without other carnies being aware of their demonic nature and their keen interest in terrorism.
The first thing I did after paying admission and entering the fairground was to head for the southern perimeter of the midway, where in the past there had been a long row of specialty tents, including games (not of the arcade kind) and novelty services. The offerings along that flank of the concourse were pretty much as they had been in past years, among them: Bingo Palace; Quarter Toss; an air-rifle shooting gallery; Wearable Art, where an artist with an airbrush would paint any image you wanted on a T-shirt; Face It, where you could have your face decorated with water-soluble paints in an almost infinite variety of ways.
Although I had not intended to go anywhere incognito, I had changed my mind about that when it came to the carnival. If possible, I preferred to prowl the midway without being recognized. I had not lived in Pico Mundo for the past eleven months, but I had known a lot of people there. Furthermore, after the events at Green Moon Mall almost two years earlier, photos of me had been in the newspapers; therefore, I might be recognized by many people whom I didn’t know.
Some of them would tell me that I was a hero, which would be embarrassing. I’d never felt like any kind of hero, considering that, even with my intervention, nineteen people had died that day. Almost as disturbing, some of those who recognized me might be the cultists who currently wanted to kill me.
The front of the Face It tent was entirely open. On the interior hung blown-up photos of previous customers whose faces had served as canvases for the artists who owned this little concession.
I wondered what their true faces had looked like before they had been painted. Of course, a fresh-scrubbed face may be a lie, and the truth may be a darkness behind it.
An attractive dark-haired woman in her early forties sat on a chair beside a table on which were arranged different brushes, as well as bottles of paint and Ziploc bags of glitter in a wide variety of colors. She applied a brush and a small sponge to the face of a teenage girl who sat before her on another chair, working upward from the chin, already at the forehead, creating a floral scene, so that the girl appeared to be peering out at the world through a bouquet of wildflowers; or perhaps she was meant to be a meadow nymph with a face composed of flowers. A second teen, friend of the seated girl, stood watch, already given a leopard’s visage, her face a rich golden orange with black spots and realistically rendered cat whiskers.
A second artist also worked in the tent. Currently not engaged, she smiled and raised her eyebrows quizzically and with a gesture invited me to the chair in front of her. Judging by appearance, this painter could be the daughter of the other. Attractive, with black hair and celadon eyes, she was unmistakably the dead woman from my dream, the first corpse that had drifted past me through the drowned streets of Pico Mundo.
When I sat in the chair, she said, “How do you want to look?”
“Different,” I said. “Very different.”
She considered me in silence for a moment and then said, “I can do all the faces you see on the walls here and almost anything else. Any character or animal. Or something abstract.”
“Surprise me,” I said.
She smiled again. “No one’s ever asked to be surprised before. Nobody wants to risk looking foolish.”
“Why would you make me look foolish?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t. Why would I? But most people want to look cool, and there’s a thin line between cool and foolish.”
I liked her voice. It had a smoky quality. She had not spoken in the dream. The corpse of the little girl, borne along after her, was the one that said contumax.
“What’s your name?” I asked, as she studied her bottles of paint and evidently considered what design she intended to create.
“Connie. What’s yours?”
“Norman,” I replied, and wondered if we both had lied. “How long have you worked in the carnival?”
“I grew up in it. What do you do, Norman?”
“I’m a librarian.”
She met my eyes. “You don’t look like a librarian.”
“What do I look like?”
“You look like an Ethan, not a Norman, and you look like maybe a Navy SEAL or an Army Ranger, not a librarian.”
“Not really. I’m no tough guy.”
“Truly tough guys never say they’re tough.”
“Some of them do. And then they beat on you to prove it.”
Opening a bottle of paint, she said, “You don’t look beaten up.”
“I avoid confrontation.”
“By taking the other guy down before he lands a blow?”
“I prefer to run like hell away from him.”
Picking up a brush, she said, “Please close your eyes and keep them closed. I don’t want to get paint in them.”
I closed my eyes and asked, “Why Ethan?”
“I have an older brother named Ethan. The name is from the Hebrew, meaning permanent, assured.”
“Does he paint faces, too?”
“He was supposed to run the Bingo Palace that my dad owns. But he wanted to do something else. If the brush tickles, tell me, and I’ll use a sponge instead, as much as I can.”
“It doesn’t tickle. What does your brother do?”
“He’s a Navy SEAL.”
I wanted to open my eyes to study hers, but I didn’t. “So I must look a little like your brother.”
“You don’t look anything like him. But you have an Ethan quality about you.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“It’s the best thing.”
“You’re embarrassing me here.”
“That’s something Ethan would say.”
She worked quickly, and in ten minutes or so, she told me that I could look, whereupon she gave me a large hand mirror.
Around my eyes, she had painted a harlequin’s mask. Otherwise, from hairline to jawline, she’d drawn a pattern of black and white diamonds so perfectly straight-edged in spite of the contours of my face that it had the effect of making my features all but disappear into that rigid geometry. Even Stormy would not have recognized me.
“A harlequin is a clown,” I said.
“More accurately, a buffoon. When I asked how you would like to look, you said, ‘Different. Very different.’ I can’t imagine anything more different from what you are than a buffoon.”
I met her stare and said, “Have you ever had a dream that came true, Connie?”
She didn’t immediately reply. She took the mirror from me and put it on the table. She met my stare and held it and at last said, “Only once. I don’t dream all that much.”
“Was it a dream about a flood, a whole town drowned in it?”
She glanced at her mother, who had finished with the second teenager and was working on a ten-year-old girl while the child’s parents watched with delight. None of them were paying attention to us, but Connie lowered her voice anyway. “No. Not a flood. It was a dream about … about this guy who walks in here and wants to look ‘Different. Very different.’ ”
Her expression was so solemn that I believed her.
“Dreamed it just last night,” she said.
“I told you to surprise me, and you just did.”
“In the dream, I knew the guy was in trouble, he had enemies.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Probably you shouldn’t say anything. If you did, maybe your trouble would become mine.”
I nodded, took out my wallet, and paid her.
As I turned to leave the tent, she said, “Don’t worry. Your own mother wouldn’t know you.”
I said, “She never has.”